Improvement initiatives may be little more than educated guesses at the ideas and activities that have the potential of improving the maturity level of a process or knowledge area. Remember, they may have come as a result of a brainstorming session. Even though they are the task force's educated guesses, they are expected to result in some level of improvement. That expectation may even be stated quantitatively. As a result, we have to continuously monitor the actual improvement and take the necessary steps to continue to deliver improvements until that expectation is met or it is clear that it cannot be met following the current approach. In this chapter we will take a much closer look at the performance of those improvement initiatives and develop action plans to reach specific maturity level goals.

We will illustrate a continuous improvement program, by way of a case study, which is drawn from an actual client engagement (obviously, the names have been changed to protect the client's identity). Not all of the analyses that were conducted produced usable results, so only the more informative analyses will be shown here.

In this chapter we will follow the improvement initiatives from beginning to end. The case study is particularly well suited to this book because it utilizes all of the tools and analyses introduced in the earlier chapters. My purpose in presenting this case study is to demonstrate the power and applicability of the tools. You will also gain a better understanding of how...